Cameroon - Arrival

The final stop on our trip is a long-delayed return (for me) to Cameroon. I spent two years here as a Peace Corps Volunteer between 1999 and 2001, teaching high school physics and geology in a government high school in Kumba, in the southwestern part of the country. I had always intended to come back and visit, and finally made it back to Douala after 9 years and 35 days.

Any two-year period generates memories in life, but those two years were more memory-generating than most, and the overall experience has impacted my life in any number of ways. Without those years in Cameroon, I would likely not have been interested in public policy for graduate school, not have met Becca, not have visited South Africa and thus had an interest in the World Cup. The experience informed and changed my opinions on any number of subjects that could fill many, many blog posts (for instance, I think that the US Post Office does an amazing job). And Becca has never seen the place.

So, from the start, I planned for these 13 days to be filled with visits to my old haunts and to actively dredge up memories, to visit my old house, my old school, the spots where I vacationed with and visited other Peace Corps Volunteers (who remain an integral part of those memories and lifelong friends--it was with one of them that we stayed during our visit to Kigali in May), to find former students or colleagues, to see how Cameroon is different and how it's similar.

Our journey here began months ago, when I looked up the visa requirements from the Cameroon embassy in Washington and discovered that a) Cameroon requires tourist visas to be obtained in advance and b) they only issue the things 60 days in advance of a visit. The 60-day threshold was perilously close to our departure date, so we resolved to get the thing in Pretoria.

Two weeks ago, we arrived at the Cameroon High Commission in Pretoria hoping to get visas and to be on our way. We should have known better. The consular official handed us the visa requirements: valid passport (check!), proof of plane reservation (check!), completed application (ok), proof of "sufficient funds" (I had brought a bank statement, check!), letter of approval from your employer (uh, hmm, really?), proof of hotel reservation (really??), and $100 (well, if you insist). We showed him what we had (basically everything but the letter and the hotel reservation) and he sneered at us: "Why didn't you get this in Washington? We only give visas to South Africans." After we explained the 60-day problem he relented. "Ok, come back when you have a complete file."

So, uh, we turned in a "complete" file. And we were duly issued a visa three days later. (Because of the delay, we travelled to the Kruger Park in South Africa rather than visiting Namibia or Botswana, as our passports were held by the Cameroonians).

So we were in!

We arrived at Douala airport at 7:30pm on July 14 after a six-hour flight from Johannesburg and a brief stopover in Libreville, Gabon. Various authors of Africa travel have remarked on the dichotomy of travelling from Johannesburg, whose airport (especially with the World Cup upgrades) is a rival to any in the world in terms of modernity. We left ATMs and cafes and duty-free jewelry stores and, a few hours later met the decay and chaos of Douala's airport. The airport infrastructure is more or less unchanged since 2001, and we walked off the plane onto the tarmac and up a flight of stairs to the jetway--the mechanism to move it up against the plane was broken. Down a long corridor to the health check (all visitors to Cameroon and most of West Africa are required to have a WHO-certified yellow fever vaccination, and to prove it on arrival) where we waived our certificates past a bored immigration official who stamped our passports, and into the grubby arrival hall.

It's hard to describe "grubby" in one of these places, and developing countries tend to be a bit touchy about people taking photos of airports or power stations or banks, so I can't show you what it looks like. Hot and sweaty, full of travellers and porters and security agents, with just a few dim fluorescent bulbs flickering from the high ceiling, with unfinished toilet stalls in the basement, and in desperate need of a good paint job and a sweep, it's the kind of room you can only find in the developing tropics.

I had remembered a more chaotic scene with porters attempting to run off with your bag to a waiting taxi, but on this night we basically collected our bag and walked through customs without incident. One immediate change was useful, however. ATMs. We brought a wad of hundreds to convert into CFA, and immediately discovered that there are no money-changers at the airport. But some loiterers waved at a corner of the dark hall where a visa logo stood, and to my surprise there was an ATM. And it gave us money. And it (apparently) gave us money at a good exchange rate!

So, with my broken French we arranged a taxi and made our way to the Foyer du Marin, our pre-booked accomodation for that first night in Douala.